Posted on 05/27/2010 8:48:33 AM PDT by Big Bureaucracy
May 10, Associated Press reports:
A junk shot would be followed by cement to seal the leak and the technique is something company officials said they might try next week.
The junk shot was not tried the next week, but 16 days later under the name of Top Kill. Right after President Obama allegedly screamed: “Plug the damn hole”. The Coast Guard approved the Junk Shot called Top Kill operation.
The question folks will be asking while soaking in oil trying to rescue the US Gulf Coast is: What took you so long?
Let’s take a look at the time line of the disaster and what was The Plan:
April 25 – The Plan is for remote underwater vehicles to activate a blowout preventer and stop leak, but the effort fails.
May 2 – BP starts to drill a relief well. Basically BP is drilling for oil and when the new wells are complete in two-three months BP will be ready to go ahead with production. This is a long shot – not emergency plan. Meanwhile BP was building a giant chamber to cap the leaking well.
May 8 – BP’s containment dome proves worthless when a buildup of crystallized gas prevents engineers from placing the chamber over the oil leak. Let’s notice that the idea of the chamber is not to cap the leak forever, but to siphon the oil into BP’s tankers. Again – it is a production solution, not a well-kill solution.
May 9 – BP says it might try to plug the undersea leak by pumping materials such as shredded up tires and golf balls into the well at high pressure, a method called a “junk shot.” The plan was cleaning around, but not killing the leak.
(Excerpt) Read more at bigbureaucracy.com ...
Ya think?
Nobody said it wasn’t hard.
A well thought-out emergency disaster plan would have addressed this scenario and been on the shelf in case it was ever needed.
What took so long? Maybe the fact that the rig weighs one million pounds and they were placing it a mile deep in the ocean had something to do with it. Guessing.
Spoken like an omniscient Liberal.
You probably can’t get supplies for this type of stuff at Kmart....Where’s Superman when you need him
It never made it off of the shelf. The burn was denied. Now we find out that the ports for this top kill operation are built right into the Well Head. Presumably, they could have done this a month ago. That is the question that is being asked in this article.
The author is asserting that BP was avoiding this because they meant to save the well. This is a bit insane, but the author makes a good case. Each thing BP has done has been to end up with a working well at the end rather than stopping the flow ASAP. This changed when the politics started aiming Fire right at Obama and then orders went out. Kill the well. Mmmmm.
This kind of sounds like the final episode of Lost.
this is what Obama will say today. However they tried first solutions that will save production from that well - instead of trying the kill the leak solutions first.
I can barely keep my decorative pond in working order, so I’m inclined to cut folks working a mile down some slack.
It wasn’t so much about recovering the oil but getting it into a channeling system...instead of spread out. They can skim till the cows come home.
All I am asking is why they tried first building the giant chamber instead of the top kill first? How did they prioritize the plan options?
I’m just a guy with a pond.
As a veteran of the nuclear power industry, this is a the big question; isn’t it? At least in nuclear the risk is well known and planned for with all kinds of redundancy of mitigation.
Looks like the government-industry governance of risk fell apart here. Many of us had no idea that oil could self flow out of a hole with such volume. I always though it had to be pumped or coaxed out.
What other industries are accidents waiting to happen? This is what we should be asking now. This is one area where some degree of government involvement is necessary. Not a stifling degree, but enough to keep the common good protected.
What make them choose to build a giant chamber first instead of collecting equipment for a top kill first? The plan that would save the well got priority.
Sure, just ike all those “omnniscient liberals” who wrote military operations plans to help our military respond rapidly and successfully to every conceivable (hint: every conceiveable) detail of ongoing and future wars
you’re welcome by the way
Thanks- that is why I asked the question!
Restores my faith in planners, confirms my fears about company greed
They have lots of plans, none of the were judged to be worth the try and the ones they did try didn’t work.
This is new territory were in here, folks. My personal opinion is that they have done a great job.
Those of you who think this is not rocket science don’t have a clue as to hwo difficult the situation is at 5,000 feet.
Kudos to the people at BP.
Some guy on the radio had a good idea, he said why can’t they take an approach like they do with stents in people?
A long tube type apparatus that would push something into the pipe, something that as it unfolded would get all meshed up and slow it down...
I think the pressure was too high to try jamming stuff into the pipe. Maybe the pressure has dropped a bit since then, with all the oil already out.
The weill hole is 18,000 feet. I don’t see how jamming “junk” into the top 3000 feet of the well and cementing it makes it unusable later. They already seal wells with concrete, and I’m sure they can drill back through the junk if this worked, but the plan was to drill a new hole and interect this well some level down. So long as that is below the junk, or if the junk can be sucked back out, they should still be able to use the well.
They could also drill a new 18,000 foot hole — they KNOW the oil is down there now.
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